Addressing Current Events in the World History Classroom

Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

World history teachers sometimes
feel uncomfortable discussing current events in our classrooms.1 After all,
unlike our social science colleagues, our mandate involves teaching students
about the past rather than the present. World history surveys already pose an
enormous structural challenge: how to cover hundreds of years of global history
in a single semester. The addition of extra material, ripped from the
headlines, might seem like it will compound this problem, stealing time that should
be devoted to the complexities of the past.

At the same time, a chief merit of our
discipline is that it can help students better understand the present – to
trace the historical origins of current debates and crises. In an era when the
humanities are dismissed as irrelevant, and pundits and politicians often know
little about the past, historians no longer have the luxury of ignoring the
present and of failing to engage with current events.

In a deeply divided society, discussing
headlines in the classroom might seem daunting. How can world history teachers
discuss controversial topics without alienating students or distracting from what
we are supposed to be teaching? A recent discussion on H-World raised the
question of how world historians could discuss the present without crossing
into partisanship. One worry expressed was that this task has become more
complicated since the 2016 election. 2

In this article, I want to share my
approach to addressing current events in the world history classroom. While
commentators may see our current political landscape as unusually divided or uncivil,
I have always taught a politically diverse population. My approach has been to engage
all of my students, without alienating those whose views might be different
than my own. In referencing current
topics, I connect them to our material and use them as fodder for historical analysis.
Indeed, in invoking current events in my classroom, I address students not as
Democrats or Republicans (let alone potential Front national voters or Chinese Communist Party members, since my
classes include international students of unknown political beliefs). Instead,
I treat my students as budding historians, for whom current events are a
particularly resonant means of learning how to think historically.

World history instructors may find
themselves discussing current events in class for two reasons: first, if they
introduce this material, and second, if students ask questions connecting past with
present. I will start with the latter case, since it might seem most
intimidating to teachers who do not normally integrate current events into
their classes. The H-World discussion focused on two sample questions that a
teacher might worry about answering, lest she seem partisan. The first was "What is
fascism and is it true that the President is fascist?" and the second was
"I see the French government is trying to eliminate wage differences
between men and women. We don't have wage differences between men and women, do
we?" In my response in that discussion, I noted that I approach such
questions as I always have, teaching in an area (northern San Diego County) with
deep political fractures. I address questions differently depending on whether
they ask for facts or my opinion.

In the first case,
regarding whether the President is fascist, I would want to ensure that my
students know what fascism means historically, as opposed to as an airy
epithet. I would begin by giving them primary sources, such as Mussolini's
"What is Fascism (1932)" from the Italian encyclopedia (Internet Modern History
Sourcebook [https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/mussolini-fascism.asp]). I would
talk about the traumas of World War I and how fascism developed in Germany, Italy
and elsewhere. Only after ensuring that students understood interwar fascism (a
topic squarely within the mandate of modern world history courses) would I
explain that there are debates today about whether the president's ideas and
conduct are fascist. I almost always
reframe questions that ask for my opinion about the present; I am aware of the
power dynamics of my classroom and know that giving students my own answer
might preempt their critical thinking by implying that I expect them to agree.
Instead, I try to present a range of analyses. In this case, I would refer them
to articles from History News Network [https://historynewsnetwork.org/] offering competing perspectives from
historians on this question.3 Depending on when in the semester the question was posed, I might say, "We'll
be learning more about fascism in a few weeks, and you'll be able to decide
what you think then!"

I take a different approach to questions that
call for factual information, such as the wage gap between male and female
workers in the U.S. It has not been my
experience that college students, even in 2018, are hostile to being presented
with data. Consequently, I would treat
this question not as a political but a factual one. I have found that students
enjoy digging deeper beyond what they see on the news, and that they feel
empowered when they learn things that others around them do not know. In this
case, I might say, "Though many people don't realize it and the extent of this
gap has changed over time, there are still wage gaps; here is some recent data."
One of our mandates as world historians is teaching information literacy; it is
essential that instructors help students assess the veracity of information available
online. If I did not know the latest data on the wage gap, I might model a
Google search for it. I would explain
the limits of Wikipedia (an entry might have links to high-quality articles in its
References, but we cannot be sure of the accuracy of crowdsourced content
without further research).4 Bypassing
Wikipedia, I would show them data from more reliable sources that confirm a
gap, even if they disagree about its extent. These might include pages from the
U.S. Department of Labor (https://www.dol.gov/wb/media/gender_wage_gap.pdf), the Pew Research Center (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/03/gender-pay-gap-facts/), the American Association of University
Women (https://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/) and CNN (http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/04/pf/pay-gap-sexual-harassment/index.html). Depending on how much time we had, I might
link this question to larger issues about gender in world history; I might
explain that, even though ideas about gender in the U.S. and elsewhere have
evolved significantly in the last century, inequalities remain.

Certainly,
given our time constraints, not every question can receive a thorough response.
Sometimes I say that a question will distract us too much from our main topic,
and I invite a student to chat after class. Still, I receive greater student
engagement when I am responsive to at least some questions about the
present. If that requires me to trim
details on the spot from a planned lecture, I find that pushes me into sharper
focus about my core learning objectives. Helping students distinguish between minor details and major historical changes
is one of the hallmarks of my world history survey. It is worthwhile for me as
an instructor, in turn, to have regular tune-ups to my lesson plans; my
students benefit when I am forced to reassess what they must leave the class
knowing, as opposed to details that they may forget right after the exam.

Student
questions connecting past and present have greatly improved my course over two
decades of teaching world history. When
I first began teaching the survey, I avoided discussing the news. I wanted
students to understand how the past shaped the present – but I felt that, if we
had not covered a topic yet, it was too early for them to make connections
between it and something happening now. Moreover, I worried about jumping
around chronologically, when I was trying to teach the importance of causality
and of unintended consequences. I hesitated to say anything about the present
until the very last class period, when I would give my "The World in ___" (whatever year it was) lecture. Only on that day would I offer
my own analysis of the present, whether on the legacy of colonialism or the potentially
dangerous effects of new technologies (for instance, how internet search
engines facilitate bomb-making).

Student questions prompted me to change
that approach and to make connections earlier.5 As
someone who lives in the U.S. and who was trained as a European historian, I
used to teach industrialization and unhealthy worker conditions as nineteenth-century
topics. But students, who have diverse backgrounds and whose lives are often
more rooted in the present, reminded me that the conditions we read about in
industrializing Britain are current elsewhere, whether in maquiladoras across our border with Mexico or on iPhone assembly
lines in China. Alluding to continuing battles
over workplace regulation (whether abroad or in U.S. debates over sick leave
for workers) has made the Industrial Revolution less remote.

In addition to discussing headlines when
students invoke them, I find that planning references to the news makes
students more engaged.6 Unlike my upper-division college courses,
which students take because they enjoy history, my lower-division surveys
enroll many non-majors who are there because of general education requirements.
These students may have come to believe that history is boring, a series of
names and dates they must memorize which are irrelevant to their lives. Connecting past and present helps move
students away from this view; it captures their attention and illustrates why
world history is worthwhile.

As an example, I integrated the 2018
Women's Marches into the first lecture of the semester in January 2018. On the first day of class, I always introduce
students to what doing world history means, compared to national history. We consider the vast amount of material our
course spans (1500 to the present around the world) and how that makes our
enterprise different from other history courses (even from a U.S. history survey,
which has to speed through 150 years of history from only one country). I explain that we cannot possibly treat
everything that happened everywhere in the last five centuries—that we will
only scratch the surface, learning big themes and whetting their appetite for
future learning about topics of their choice. I also explain that world historians are interested in connections and
comparisons: if a process happened only in one country and had no resonance
elsewhere, it may be of interest to a national historian but not a world
historian. However, if a phenomenon happened in Texas, Tokyo and Togo, then a
world historian will want to investigate it.

Turning to the marches, I showed media
coverage exploring the differences in emphasis at rallies in New York,
Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. I explained that, while these variations were
interesting, at first the March seemed to me to be a national event—of
interest to a historian of the U.S. but not to a world historian. As I delved more deeply into the coverage, I
showed them that Women's Marches had taken place not only in Oklahoma City and
Orlando, but also in Osaka, Ottawa and Oaxaca. I added that, when making
comparisons, world historians focus on the interplay between global trends and
local processes. I therefore explained
that, even if people participated in an event with a common title, they did not
always march for the same reasons; they often cared more about issues relevant
locally. Where U.S. marchers focused on U.S. politics, marchers abroad did not
necessary wear "pussy hats" or discuss President Trump. I showed posters from the marches in Osaka
linking more to the #TimesUp movement and calling for
respect for women in general.7 In
Ottawa, marchers focused on local issues. As the New York Times reported, "Many marchers wore red scarves as
a gesture of support for the large number of indigenous women whose murders or
disappearances have received relatively little attention from the police."8

I
further used the marches to explain that visual representations of data, such
as maps, can be misleading. Though the Women's March Global map showed dots all
over the world,9 I explained, that did not mean the march was equally important to residents in
each of those places. Where a march in the U.S. might have drawn tens of
thousands, a dot in Asia or Africa might represent a few dozen. World
historians, I told them, are interested in connections, but we do not assume
that a phenomenon happening in multiple locations has equal strength in each.

Without
advocating for or against these marches, I illustrated what world historians
do. I found that students who were
hostile to having to take a history course seemed more invested in our material
afterwards; they realized that I would help them better understand current
events without requiring that they adopt a particular political perspective. By
keeping our focus on historical analysis skills, I was able to make our class
meaningful to students who had participated in these marches, without
estranging students who opposed them.

In upper division classes, I also try to
show students how a world history approach can help them understand
contemporary politics and diplomacy. Even when my political perspective,
informed by my work as a historian, differs from my students, I have found that
students often discover the parallels that I think about, especially after
reading sources. In Fall 2003, I taught my Comparative French Colonialism
course to a population that included veterans, active-duty Marines, and family
members of deployed soldiers. At the height of the "Freedom Fries" era, many
were angry with France for not participating in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. If I
had tried to explain to them myself that the French were not being irrational
in choosing to join the U.S. in Afghanistan but not in Iraq, I might have faced
a mutiny! Instead, I waited patiently for our unit on the French experience in
Algeria. After students read primary and
secondary sources about this topic,10 many realized that the French thought they would be greeted with flowers for "rescuing
Algerians from Ottoman tyranny." They also discovered that Algerian Muslims
were bitterly opposed to being invaded by European Christians and had begun
decades of armed resistance. By the end
of this unit, students had lightbulbs go off in their minds, commenting that
the French experience in Algeria "seems just like what is happening with us in
Iraq." They realized that the French
decision not to join the U.S. had been based not in cowardice or a "willingness
to appease," but on lessons learned from Algeria.

Analyzing
the news can be more challenging if an event has happened just before class,
and I have little time to plan my lesson. Still, I try to take a similar
approach to recent controversies like that over DACA. When President Trump announced the revocation
of this program early on September 5, 2017, I knew that I must address it that
day in my course on Travel and Contact in the Early Modern World. Not only are
borders and migration among the course's core themes, but I expected that some
students would be anxious and unable to focus on our material if I did not
acknowledge what had happened. I teach
at a public comprehensive university in California that serves a diverse
population of traditional and non-traditional students. CSUSM has been
designated a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and an Asian American Native
American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI); it is also considered
among the top 25 campuses in the country for veterans and active duty students.11 Among my students were undoubtedly some who
were DACAmented and others who were citizen children
of undocumented parents. I also anticipated that our class contained students
who shared the President's views about immigrants; I wanted to make sure that
they did not feel excluded from the historical enterprise in which we were engaged. I chose to focus on the fact that recent
ideas of borders—as fixed lines that must not be crossed without papers—are
a relatively new phenomenon, one that was not widespread in the early modern
period. I also referred students to my
colleague Deborah Kang's book The INS on
the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (Oxford
UP, 2017), which traces changes in US-Mexico border policy over the twentieth
century, as well as the uneven ways in which immigration laws have been
applied.

Overall, I have found it pedagogically useful
to incorporate current events into world history courses, even if only for a
small portion of class time. Students of
all views have welcomed the idea that history can help them decode confusing
news stories. Ideally, all of my students (no matter where they fall on the
political spectrum) leave my courses having changed their mind about some
mistaken belief they held, and with better appreciation for the value of
history. In teaching students historical thinking skills and arming them with
information about the past, I aim to empower them to draw their own conclusions
about the present. For one thing, once they graduate, they will no longer have
my colleagues or me to turn to for this kind of analysis, so they will need to
develop these habits themselves. Even more so, I find that knowledge "sticks"
more when it is discovered for oneself rather than having been force-fed. When students email years later, indicating
that they thought of me when they heard something in the news, and understood
it better because of my course, I feel heartened that my approach has had
enduring results. Connecting past and present—and modelling historical
analysis—helps us create better history students and more educated citizens.

4 A
class might even want to edit Wikipedia as an experiment, either to see what
happens when they add something false, or to improve the quality of selected
entries based on primary sources and recent scholarship. Seeing whether the editors accept or reject
these changes will give them insight into how this crowdsourced site works,
compared to peer-reviewed journals.

5 My
colleague Zhiwei Xiao has had success integrating the
news more systematically. He requires students to read the New York Times's World section each day before each class (he notes
that the four-month Academic Rate is much cheaper than a textbook, currently
$4/month). While prepping for class, Prof. Xiao identifies articles that seem
most relevant to that day's lecture. Then he begins the class period asking
students which stories they found most interesting. He sees if they can
identify the articles most relevant to what they are covering; if not, he
signals them himself. Prof. Xiao notes
that, "Most of the time, I can find something in that section of the paper that
I can connect with the theme I planned to address that day. A story about an
African country may provide a good lead-up to a discussion of the legacy of
colonialism, a territorial dispute somewhere reminds us of the history of
empire building, and news about the release of another gadget or computer game
could be used to start the lecture on the role of science and technology in
modern history" (email to author, April 3, 2018).

10 These
included Alf Heggoy, The French Conquest of Algiers, 1830: An Algerian Oral Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1986); and Alexis de
Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and
Slavery, ed. and trans. by Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000). For a fuller discussion of how I have adapted this
course at different political moments, see Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "'Is
This Tocqueville or George W. Bush?' Teaching French Colonialism in Southern
California After 9/11," World History
Bulletin XXVI, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 18–23.

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